His Last Dollar

Summary

A dust-laden parable of metamorphosis, His Last Dollar opens on the blistered hooves of a boy who once hawked headlines for pennies and now brands steers beneath an ochre horizon; Joe Braxton’s fortune is measured not merely in Texas acreage but in the ache of every mile between the prairie and the gaslit canyons of Manhattan. Into this vertiginous wealth swans Tom Linson—slick as lamp-black, fingernails buffed to a predatory gleam—who treats the stock ticker like a harpsichord, each keystroke a minor chord of ruin. Beside him glides Viola Grayson, society’s gilded lamprey, her laughter a champagne saber ready to decapitate innocence. Their quarry: the rancher’s unguarded millions and, more piquantly, the last filament of honor clinging to Colonel Downs, the ink-stained patriarch who once tossed young Joe a nickel for every extra sold. The swindle metastasizes when Linson forges railway bonds, collapsing Downs’s newspaper empire and aiming the shrapnel at Eleanor, the colonel’s luminous daughter, whose spine stiffens into saber-steel once she discovers the plot. In a candle-scented library she warns Joe—too late—her whispered intel arriving like a telegram soaked in blood. The market devours Braxton’s liquid cash; only a single copper cent remains, flattened by boot-heel superstition into a pocket talisman. That coin, flipped onto the nostrils of the long-shot trotter Mongrel, becomes the axis on which fate pirouettes: a thunderous homestretch, a finish line stitched in Kentucky moonlight, a fortune respun from mud, sweat, and gambler’s grace.

Synopsis

Former newsboy and jockey Joe Braxton, becomes a millionaire rancher and decides to visit New York. He soon becomes the prey of swindler Tom Linson and socialite Viola Grayson. Linson defrauds Braxton's old employer, Colonel Downs, and attempts to corrupt Eleanor, the colonel's daughter. When Eleanor learns that Linson intends to destroy Joe on the stock exchange, she warns him, disregarding Linson's threat to ruin her reputation. Eleanor is too late, but Joe recovers his losses by riding Mongrel to victory in the Kentucky Futurity, after having stacked his last dollar on the horse's success.